Why I Shot the Sheriff
by starofoberon
Summary: The crime scene suggests an UNSUB who is a fan of fictional vampires. However, real vampires have just "come out of the coffin," and one of them steps forward to explain the differences between fantasy and reality to a nervous, dubious JJ. One-shot, COMPLETE


A/N 1: This is in response to the July 2012 "Out of our comfort zones" CCOAC challenge that required me to write a _True Blood_ and _Criminal Minds_ crossover featuring Eric Northman and Jennifer Jareau. Thanks as always to Esperanta who makes me look so good.

A/N 2: No matter whose timeline I use, there will be continuity problems. For purposes of this story, the world's vampires are newly "out of the coffin"—they've publicly acknowledged their existence—and as long as it can't be proved that an individual vampire committed a crime, he or she isn't subject to arrest. The Vampire Rights Amendment isn't even a blip on the horizon yet. This happens well prior to both Charlaine Harris's books and _True Blood_, but in Season 7 of _Criminal Minds_ because JJ's functioning as a profiler, not a press liaison.

Deal with it.

**Why I Shot the Sheriff**

She and the Team had been in Louisiana for less than half a day when one of the locals, a woman who worked the tip line, handed a note to Hotch. He read it, looked at the local, who gave the universal _"Hey, don't blame me, I just write 'em down"_ shrug, and read it again.

"Thank you," he said to the local. She offered him—offered all of them—a thin, sympathetic smile, and left the room.

He read the note again, and the hand not holding the slip of paper went up automatically to massage his temples.

_Must be bad, _JJ thought_._

Another read, even less enthusiastic than the last.

_Must be really bad._

"All right," he said with a disgusted sigh. "We no longer have the luxury of ignoring the elephant in the room."

They were looking at three deaths in a small rural parish, all of which appeared to have all kinds of Goth-y, Twilight-y markers to them. It was obvious to the Team, though, that the deaths were straightforward murders with clumsy symbolism and lame attempts at blood-drinking.

The elephant in the room was that five weeks earlier, a week before the first murder was discovered, a bunch of otherwise fairly normal-looking people had held press conferences all over the _world_ and announced that they were vampires. Real, honest-to-goodness vampires. Blood-drinking, sunlight-shunning, garlic-avoiding, undead, don't-stake-my-heart vampires.

They were "coming out of the coffin," they said. They paid taxes, they said. Obeyed local laws. Now, they wanted equal rights.

_Well, hell, yeah. World isn't anywhere near weird enough yet._

And they weren't a one-day, _"Ha-ha, we came out on Halloween, get it?"_ wonder. Their PR people—in the States, that was generally a gaunt blonde chick named Flanagan who looked unnervingly like Ann Coulter—were all over the media. They talked up how this development by Japanese vampires, marketed in the States as Tru Blood, made it possible for them to live comfortably without feeding off animals. (Feeding off humans had been an official no-no, they claimed, for generations.)

No fangs, no capes, no _anything_ that might make them seem different from anyone else—just these sharp, unflappable spokespeople who only came out at night and who said, "We're just like you."

The Bureau's official position was that it was a world-class practical joke that had gone on so long that it was no longer funny.

But there was Aaron Hotchner with this slip of paper in his hand. "OK," he said, and somehow he managed to sound official and serious as he spoke. "The, ah, Sheriff of Shreveport—that would be the _vampire_ sheriff of the _vampires_ of Shreveport, not Vince—is asking to meet with a representative of the Bureau to discuss the murders." His fingers dug in a little harder at his temple. "His name's Eric Northman, and coincidentally, he's also the owner of Fangtasia, a vampire-themed bar there in Shreveport. He's cleared his schedule to meet with a member of the Team at 5:30."

He looked up at her with a pathetically hopeful look on his face. "JJ, you want to field this?"

"Why me?" she blurted.

"Because—you do off-beat so well?"

"Great." She didn't even bother to mask the sarcasm. "But it isn't even noon. Why's the appointment so late?"

"Happy hour," Morgan suggested. "Maximum exposure for the 'official vampire consult' thing. We're being used."

"Probably," Hotchner agreed, "but according to the message, which is from Northman's so-called day-intern, the meeting can't take place until after sundown."

"Wait," Emily Prentiss said, her face dark with disgust. "What's in it for us to meet with this guy? We show up, it's like we're agreeing, 'Oh, sure, the Bureau believes in vampires. In fact, there are good vampires who're helping us catch the bad ones.' Do we want to perpetuate that myth?"

"You're looking at it wrong," Dave said, not even waiting for official word from the Unit Chief. "You go talk to this dude, you aren't saying 'I believe in vampires.' You're saying, 'Hey, these murders are vampire-themed and you know everything there is to know on vampire-theme stuff. I'm here to pick your brains.'"

Reid shifted in his seat. "You know, I'd kind of like to go."

"I agree," said JJ. "Reid should go. He'd do a great job."

"Sorry, Reid," the chief replied, "I need you here. We're interviewing the guys from the college today. JJ, you're on your own."

**~ o ~**

Fangtasia proved to be a long, low building in the suburbs, surrounded by a parking lot that was already, at that early evening hour, jammed with cars. There was already a short line, perhaps a ten-person holdup, on getting into the club. Some patrons looked fairly normal; others looked like refugees from horror movies. Capes, corsets, and plastic fangs warred with regular club gear and even the loud shirts and cargo shorts of tourists.

JJ bypassed the line, flashed her creds at the bouncer, and said, "Appointment with Sheriff Northman." She'd thought about that for a while, had thought about calling him Mr. Northman or even just Eric, but had decided in the end that a show of respect might prove worth the effort.

The bouncer opened the door for her—the PA system already blared house music—and raised a hand as if to direct her to her right, then said, "Sir!"

A tall blond man in jeans, a tee, and a leather vest approached her, smiling.

"From the FBI, sir," the bouncer said.

"Good evening," the tall blond said. Nothing even remotely Bela Lugosi about him. He looked more like the cover illustration for a romance novel about Vikings. "Sheriff Northman. You're Ms. Jareau?"

_God, he's gorgeous._

She extended her hand automatically and he took it. His grip was firm and dry. His hand was hard and cold. Not cool. _Cold_. Not refrigerated; just…corpse-like.

_Not so gorgeous._

For an instant, she thought, _Whoa, what if there really are vampires?_ Then the sensible part of her nature said, _Right, and werewolves and dragons and Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy._

"I'm interested in any advice and direction you can give us in this thing we're looking at," she told him. She looked over at the main room of Fangtasia, where at least a hundred patrons already bobbed and laughed and danced and drank. "I'm sure you see a pretty broad range of—behaviors—here."

"We do," he said. "Of course, most of them have nothing whatsoever to do with the reality of being vampire."

_Meet it head-on, girl._ "And you're—a vampire."

He bowed his head slightly. "I am."

_Work with it, Jen. You can confront him later._ "And how long have you been a vampire?"

He shrugged modestly. "Around eleven hundred years. Do you need exact figures?"

She'd just assumed he'd say _five years_, _ten years_, or possibly _sixty_. She scarcely knew how to reply to _eleven hundred_.

Before she could figure out what to say next, he was continuing. "Not all vampire were in agreement with the decision to mainstream. I confess that I have my reservations—but as always, I bow to the wisdom of the majority and our internal authorities."

"It looks as though 'coming out' is profitable for you and your club."

Northman shrugged. "Fangtasia has catered to the little Goth babies and the fangbangers for more than three years," he replied. "I can't complain, but I wasn't hurting before."

She looked again over the eager crowds. An imperious-looking blonde woman in a vaguely medieval black gown, cut low and tight, seated herself on a raised throne at one end of the room.

"And all of these people think that they're vampires?" JJ asked.

"Almost nobody in here is actually vampire," he said.

He used it, she noticed, as an adjective. _He is vampire_, not _he is a vampire_.

He surveyed the milling, bobbing crowds.

"Of those who are actually 'out,' myself included, there are six," he said, raising his voice slightly against the throbbing music. "Four of us are staff. The other two are a local and a visitor from, ah, Lake Charles, I believe."

"_Six_ real, honest-to-goodness vampires? All in this one place?" It was an effort to keep the amusement out of her voice.

His big blue eyes widened slightly. "I specified 'out,'" he said. "Vampire who'll happily discuss their orientation with you. Vampire who aren't still trying to pass. If you want to get into the whole, 'real, honest-to-goodness' thing, then—his eyes swept the room again. "Fourteen," he said.

_Oh, come on._

"And the woman on the throne?"

Northman's smile widened. "Pam is out and proud. She's Fangtasia's business manager." He opened a door. "Won't you come in, Agent Jareau? Marcus," he said to a passing waiter, "a B-pos for me, and whatever Agent Jareau would like."

A young man in Goth gear nodded politely. "What's your pleasure, ma'am?"

"Coffee's fine," she said. "Cream, no sugar."

"Little hit of chicory to it?" he asked with a little grin.

"That'd be awesome," she said with her own smile. Nothing like living with a Louisiana man to give you a healthy respect for chicory in your coffee. Within a month of Will's moving in with her, she'd been hooked.

Marcus bowed again and departed, closing the door behind him. When he did so, the office was completely quiet. The sound-proofing was outstanding.

She turned to Northman. "Also vampire?"

"Marcus? No, just a nice local boy. We're very much a minority, Agent." He sat down behind a heavy desk. "We don't eat or drink, so we don't do well in food services. Aromas that appeal to us repulse the average human, and some of the scents y'all enjoy we find intolerable. If we're going to open a bar, we'd best be surrounded by human beings who know what they're doing."

"I saw some Tru Blood for sale in a specialty grocery store in D.C.," she volunteered as she took her own seat. "Is it worth sampling?"

"Not unless you enjoy vomiting," said Northman. "It's for us, not for you. I'm told that the average human thinks it tastes disgusting. Which brings us, of course, to the situation that you at the Bureau are looking at."

"Right, of course."

"I've done my homework; I know that the Behavioral Analysis Unit has experience with what is still informally called Renfield's Syndrome—a term that's pathetic, but still preferable to its alternative, Clinical Vampirism. It's obvious that whoever committed these crimes is human, not vampire. I doubt that he's even a genuine Renfield. He's too composed—I believe you call it _organized_—to be a head case." He smiled again. "You seem surprised."

"You _have_ done your homework," she conceded. "But I'm interested in what makes you so confident that the UNSUB is—" She carefully mirrored Northman's use of the words. "Human, not vampire."

Marcus entered the room at that moment with a tray containing a tall glass, an open bottle of Tru Blood, and a steaming mug of coffee, black ceramic with stylized fangs and three raised red ceramic drops of blood. She thanked him, he nodded and was gone.

The office was again completely silent.

_You know,_ her inner scared little girl murmured to her, _if there really are vampires, this guy could drain you dry in here and not a soul on earth would hear you screaming._

The guy in question decanted some nastily thick, dark red stuff into his glass. "I can admit it, there's a documented history of vampire attacks on humans. We have our share of unhinged individuals." A modest smile. "Otherwise, why would we need our own sheriffs? But vampire frenzy, it's both less organized and more comprehensive than these attacks.

"To start with," he continued smoothly, "no vampire in frenzy would leave all that perfectly good blood there on the scene."

"You've seen crime scene pictures?"

He nodded and sipped his Tru Blood. "Of course. We have friends on the force. Every bar in the world has friends in law enforcement."

"Oh, good." She'd half-expected him to say something silly like, _Yes, our little friends, the bats, they tell us things…. _

"And while I don't myself have the gift," he continued, "one of our local number has the ability to transform into a bat. She did a thorough survey of the second crime scene."

_I'm sooo not gonna get into that._ "Why only the second?" she said, trying not to sound as if she was teasing him, which she was.

"The first incident, we suspected nothing. The third scene was found in daylight. That part of our legend is accurate," he added, serious now. "Sunlight kills."

"That's always confused me," she confessed. "Moonlight is just reflected sunlight. You'd think that it would kill, too."

"If that were so," Northman replied, "humans would use sun screen at night, too. It's the UV rays that do it."

This guy has an answer for everything.

"Look," she said, "I'm sure I'm not the first person to say this to you, but—I have a problem with the whole vampire thing."

"Of course you do," he said, unruffled. "We've spent almost three thousand years trying to hide our existence, and we've done a remarkable job of it. Even these—" His grin broadened and—snick—two slightly curved, long, sharp teeth appeared, bracketing his upper incisors. JJ's first response was panic, followed by, _come on, it's like special effects, girl_.

"—I've seen horror movies where the teeth look bigger and scarier. They'd be reasonably easy to fake," Northman concluded. "Are you armed, Agent Jareau?"

_OK, now I'm really confused._

"Yes."

"Fine." Northman stood up and walked over to a fat overstuffed divan. He stretched his arm out along the couch. "Shoot me," he said.

"What?"

"Let's get it all over with now, shall we, Agent? Let's cut through the bullshit and establish my vampire bona fides once and for all. I could cut myself, but you'd always have that little voice in your head saying, _'It was fake. I've seen David Blaine and Criss Angel. You can fake all of that stuff.'_ Let's bypass that, Agent Jareau. Your weapon, your bullets. Now. Shoot me in the arm, so we can both see where the round went. Surrender your doubts."

"I can't—"

"Of course you can," he snapped. "We'll get nowhere until you've gotten past the _ain't-no-such-thing_ barrier. For my sake, for yours, for the sake of those three coeds who died in the woods south of here, Agent—shoot me."

Not fully understanding why she was obeying, she stood up. She drew her Glock and held it no more than four feet from the bar owner's arm.

_I don't believe I'm doing this._

She fired once. An immediate bloody hole appeared in Eric Northman's forearm.

_Oh, my God, I did it, I am so screwed…._

"There," he said serenely. He presented the wound to her, rotating his forearm slowly. "Look real? Are we agreed that you shot me?"

She nodded, aghast.

"Put your finger in there, please. Don't flinch, dammit. You're an FBI agent. You should be tougher than that. For all intents and purposes, I'm a _corpse_, woman. Track the path of the bullet, Agent. Hurry, before it heals up."

_It can't get any worse than this._

She extended one finger, but he seized her wrist with a grip like a steel vise and shoved it deep into the channel. She squealed in horror and panic and thought possibly that fainting might just be the most rational response here.

"Is there any doubt that I've been shot?" he asked, his voice rising.

She could barely breathe a negative.

"Good." He released her hand, then he swiped at the blood oozing from the hole and—_licked it off his fingers, ewww. _"Did you know that you can get high from vampire blood? Well, _you_ can. I can't. It doesn't work for us."

"I've heard that," she stammered, stumbling back to her chair. "I—really need to sit down."

_I just shot an unarmed man._

"They call it V," Northman said, "and technically it isn't against the law." He winked. _"Yet."_ He continued to lick his own blood off his hand, then off his arm.

The hole in his arm was healing before her stunned gaze. Already it oozed no blood. It was shrinking as she watched. He continued to rotate the arm so she could observe the process from both sides. It had been a through-and-through wound, and it was—

_Gone. His arm's completely healed!_

"Go ahead," he said, his voice low, seductive. "Take just a teeny-tiny little lick off your finger."

She was lost. "Will it—will it turn me into a—make me vampire?" she corrected herself.

"Of course not. Turning someone vampire is a long and organized process. It doesn't just—_snap_—happen. Go ahead, Agent. Just one little lick. I won't tell if you won't."

She touched her finger to her tongue.

_Damn, he was gorgeous…and so persuasive. _

**~ o ~**

She placed the small cardboard container on the table in the BAU's conference room at the parish sheriff's office. "Souvenir mugs and glasses from Fangtasia," she said. "Two of each for everyone, including Garcia."

"You don't have any fang marks on your neck," Morgan observed.

She smiled at him. He was hungry; she could hear his stomach rumbling. She could smell the fact that Emily was on her period. She caught the subtle move that indicated that Rossi's left knee was bothering him again.

"Bad news first," she said. "Vampires are for real."

Rossi and Hotchner, alone among the assembled team, didn't look surprised. "Word from the higher-ups was to take it seriously," Hotch volunteered.

"Probably a hate crime of sorts," she continued. "Someone out to make vampire look guilty for it." She withdrew three fat file folders from the box. "As you'll see in these pictures, when someone vampire goes into his feeding frenzy thing, there's no splatter, no wasted blood. That alone clears all the vampire."

Rossi spoke up. "Maybe they just left some so it would look like—"

"Not a chance. You ever see a hardcore smoker put out a cigarette half-smoked and walk away from it? Blood isn't just food to vampire; it's sex. They made a conscious commitment to turn away from feeding on humans, but it wasn't easy. Anyone got that close to a bleeding human would have been literally lapping it up off the ground."

She dropped the second folder. "This is a list of people who've caused problems for the vamps around here before and after the Revelation. Sheriff Northman's given us extensive notes on them, but he understands that our rules of evidence aren't the same as theirs, so he's leaving it all in our hands."

"There are real vampires." Prentiss seemed to be having a serious problem getting over that notion.

"Yeah, absolutely. I met ten of them tonight. Ten." She shook her head. "Five of them are still 'in the coffin,' but they agreed to speak to me. Old, young, black, white, Asian, urban and rural, but all of them _old_. The youngest I met, she was turned in 1931, but—she's eternally twelve. Eighty-one years old and she can't enter Fangtasia legally!"

She dropped the last folder on the table. "They have their own set of weird problems working around our world and our laws," she said. "But they have criminals of their own. And they're gonna be a bitch for us track down and arrest, because, well—they have these powers. They have weaknesses, too—sunlight and silver and wood and stuff—but what they're proposing is that they work with us, show us how to deal with their kind.

"They've had their own government for hundreds of years—it's kind of a feudal structure, they have kings and queens, and their sheriffs have a lot more power than ours do—but Eric wants us to start working together sooner rather than later. He'd like to see vampire on our police forces, in the Bureau, and human working with the sheriffs, with their kings—who're appointed, obviously, since they don't reproduce—"

She was suddenly aware that everyone was watching her silently, expressions of concern (and maybe a little amusement) evident on each face.

"I'm babbling, right?"

"Right," Morgan said with a laugh. "You're babbling."

"OK, it's the V, it's like being turbocharged. It was just a drop and it was—accidental. Mostly. But it made me hyper-alert and sort of sharpened my senses."

"It'll be illegal soon," Hotchner said. "It's supposed to be highly addictive."

She shrugged. "Could be. I don't doubt that it's addictive, and I'm all for it being illegal. All I know is, eventually the Bureau's gonna need a liaison with vampire law enforcement—and it's a _whole new field of study! And I want the job_!"


End file.
